I had a post up briefly, but this was delayed because of the minor earthquake causing some broadcast hinkiness.

Impressions:

The Snow Queen is a story I actually only kind of know a few details in passing, and half of that is the ways that Frozen changed what it pulled from it. Not that I would look to this as any kind of source either, but I do recognize at least that the cursed mirror in the heart/eyes was something that affected Kai originally, not Gerda. That reveal was a bit underwhelming, probably because it came at about 8 minutes into the episode, and then everyone's just kind of all "eh, whatever," we spend a few minutes wandering through a cave, and then end up right back where we were. Even for this show, the middle of this episode was a particularly weird mess of nonstop exposition, reset, and then finishing it, bereft of the main characters doing jack squat except for a super weird declaration "that's poison apple arrow power!"

And yet, it compares favorably to its other overtures towards the main plot, which reveals the supposedly main antagonist in the form of someone named Curly. Yes, Curly. That girl with the white hair who gives orders to the god of tricksters is apparently named Curly. She just pops up to give the very unimaginative schtick that kowtowing to destiny isn't always the best thing and then zoops off into the sunset. It's certainly a road the show could've been taking the whole run, particularly with the Cinderella and Don Quixote stories, lest we forget that these people are going around rewriting reality to be how they want, but even the people they're obliterating from existence are happy for it, so I'm not entirely sure who that's supposed to convince. I mean, besides the main characters, obviously. I'm sure they'll suddenly find all manner of depths of newfound anxiety over it.

I posted some minor stuff about modding graphics, music, and movies in the game on the forum long ago, so I'll just focus on the scripts here. The ugly, horrible, awful mess that are the scripts. And also, I think (but am not sure) that may only be useful for historic purposes. I know other Eushully tools have been developed, but I have yet to see many that wouldn't make me want to tear my hair out in various ways. This set includes all the PDFs too, because they're somewhat extensive and it can be fun to see how much of the ginormous sprite sheets are actually unused.

Anyway, as I mentioned on the forums/when I released this, these scripts are a special kind of hell because the tool decompiled them into matching text files, one simply a dump of all the strings, and one a collection of unreadable machine code. The machine code files we just ignore. The strings are for both the scripts and all the items, skills, names, monsters, so on and so forth. Literally everything is in the same format. The script scripts containing the actual story and whatnot are extra bad for a few reasons. The main one is that they lack things like speaker tags or really any clue as to what's going on, so if the characters don't have distinct speaking patterns (and they often don't here), then you can consider it a crash course in learning about how Japanese is a topic-prominent language that, unlike English, frequently omits subjects in sentences. There were a lot… pretty bad translation errors in the first pass, and I consider it a miracle there weren't more in the final release.

Second, they're grouped and sorted by location, not anything sensible like chronology or related events. An event that starts in the workshop, goes to a dungeon, then back to the workshop, then to the main city screen, those four scenes will be in three different scripts. Like Daibanchou, I kept track of a lot of that just by playing through the game and marking things down in the scripts as to what lead to or from what. It did make for a fun 'game' at the end as I tried to go through the remaining untranslated text and figure out what obscure things I missed and how to trigger them, including at least one scene that was celebrating victory but was actually tied to a game over trigger.

Another fun thing about the story text is how it handles furigana/ruby text. Basically, if there's furigana, it pauses the string output, calls a different kind of string output for that word, along with another string output for the furigana itself, and then continues the line afterward. Rather than try to deal with that, furigana was just wiped out from the translation. It gets especially awful when it wants to pseudo-bold words, because it uses furigana dots to do so, resulting in short, simple lines turning into messes like this.

{{JPN|652|「あれは、}}
{{ENG|652|「That did not belong to her.」}}

{{JPN|653|あ}}
{{ENG|653|}}

{{JPN|654|●}}
{{ENG|654|}}

{{JPN|655|い}}
{{ENG|655|}}

{{JPN|656|●}}
{{ENG|656|}}

{{JPN|657|つ}}
{{ENG|657|}}

{{JPN|658|●}}
{{ENG|658|}}

{{JPN|659|の持ち物ではない」}}
{{ENG|659|}}

The non-game scripts are a similar kind of mess, especially in regards to the furigana. Items and skills are an especially awful disaster because the thing and its description are in two different files. eg ITINIT looks like this:

{{JPN|247|小さな本棚}}
{{ENG|247|Small Bookshelf}}

{{JPN|248|『部屋』配置家具}}
{{ENG|248|部屋』配置家具}}

{{JPN|249|大きな本棚}}
{{ENG|249|Large Bookshelf}}

{{JPN|250|『部屋』配置家具}}
{{ENG|250|部屋』配置家具}}

{{JPN|251|豪華な本棚}}
{{ENG|251|Gorgeous Bookshelf}}

{{JPN|252|『部屋』配置家具}}
{{ENG|252|部屋』配置家具}}

Notice that most is still untranslated, just with a slight modify to mark them as looked at. That's because those string bits are never referenced or displayed.
But the actual descriptions are over in ITMES, looking like this:

{{JPN|899|【家具：}}
{{ENG|899|}}

{{JPN|900|小}}
{{ENG|900|}}

{{JPN|901|ちい}}
{{ENG|901|}}

{{JPN|902|さな}}
{{ENG|902|}}

{{JPN|903|本棚}}
{{ENG|903|}}

{{JPN|904|ほんだな}}
{{ENG|904|}}

{{JPN|905|】}}
{{ENG|905|A meager shelf for your books}}

{{JPN|906| 『部屋』に配置可能な家具 知識UP}}
{{ENG|906|[ Room ] +4 Knowledge}}

{{JPN|907|【家具：}}
{{ENG|907|}}

{{JPN|908|大}}
{{ENG|908|}}

{{JPN|909|おお}}
{{ENG|909|}}

{{JPN|910|きな}}
{{ENG|910|}}

{{JPN|911|本棚}}
{{ENG|911|}}

{{JPN|912|ほんだな}}
{{ENG|912|}}

{{JPN|913|】}}
{{ENG|913|A sturdy bookshelf}}

{{JPN|914| 『部屋』に配置可能な家具 知識UP}}
{{ENG|914|[ Room ] +8 Knowledge}}

{{JPN|915|【家具：}}
{{ENG|915|}}

{{JPN|916|豪華}}
{{ENG|916|}}

{{JPN|917|ごうか}}
{{ENG|917|}}

{{JPN|918|な}}
{{ENG|918|}}

{{JPN|919|本棚}}
{{ENG|919|}}

{{JPN|920|ほんだな}}
{{ENG|920|}}

{{JPN|921|】}}
{{ENG|921|A shelf for true literati}}

{{JPN|922| 『部屋』に配置可能な家具 知識UP}}
{{ENG|922|[ Room ] +12 Knowledge}}

Rather than try to work with the furigana in any way, it was always blanked and everything put on a single line. There's no reason that half of every description needed to be a pronunciation guide and repeat of the name of the thing anyway, but I've ranted about the quality of life clarifications and flavor text changes I made to make consulting wikis merely optional just to play the game enough in the past.

But wait, there's one final rub to the scripts. A couple of the scripts in the appends just straight up rejected linebreaks. I don't know why. They just didn't work. I think they might've even crashed the tool. They got relegated to a Problem File directory with their own special modified version of the tool that doesn't do any linebreaking whatsoever. Those scripts are manually spaced so that they look like they're linebroken correctly.

{{JPN|12|アイテム入手や、敵との戦闘による、情報画面への登録は行われます。}}
{{ENG|12|All information on items obtained and enemies fought will be recorded in the dictionaries as normal.}}

{{JPN|13|【ＥｘｔｒａＳｔｏｒｙ】をクリアすると、本編のゲームスタート時に新たな特典が追加されます。}}
{{ENG|13|Clearing these side stories will give a reward for the next timeyou begin a new game.}}

Yep. Extra spaces when a line is too short. No spaces at all when a line fills up its exact length. We'll return to that with MDKB because that's how the entire game is linebroken!

And that is the end of the tale of what I suppose remains my translation magnum opus. Something that probably should have never been, but I'm proud it came out perhaps even better than the original Japanese release.

Where the hell has this been for the whole series? A story with some actual optimism, heart, and not filled with the characters of the week being one-dimensional lunatics. Only a few were. Which isn't to say that there weren't still an uncomfortably large number of headscratching moments where the exposition or direction did not match up at all to what it was trying to sell, but I felt far more for this couple than I did for Miss Made-To-Suffer over her two episodes in the previous arc. Hell, we even learned a valuable lesson at the end of it, giving at least the slight illusion that the characters took something from the experience. Both of them, really. Would that every episode of this show was like this. Still a bleak, ugly, unforgiving world, but not a nonstop unending press of misery and despair.

All that said, it needed a few things to have made it a great episode though. First and foremost, Dororo and Hyakki's side of the story needed to not be both so painfully padded and so ridiculously obvious that the spider wasn't to blame. They get a scene where guards gleefully tell them to look out for a kidnapper, then a scene where they speculate that there might be a reward for catching it, then a scene where they discover that there is a reward, then another scene about how there's a reward but that the villagers outright saying that they hope nobody ever finds the 'kidnapper.' That time would have been much better spent organically showing that it was a slave village rather than it just kind of being something declared partway through. They also should've figured out whether the spider killed people or not. Either way would've been fine, but trying to hew the difference between a monster who always had the soul of a shepherd and one that just now found humanity from Whose-His-Face confuses what we were supposed to take it as. One also has to wonder if we're supposed to take her as just some random monster or Hyakki gave up some piece of himself to allow them life. That's a question worth at least addressing that gets totally ignored.

Still, it remains that this was easily the strongest episode of the show so far, and I really hope it stays in this mode, especially as Hyakkimaru becomes more a person.

The thing that stood out the most about this episode was how incandescent so much of the food was. It was that kind of vapid, brainless episode. The only sort of vaguely promising thing was that the American team moved from being about a thirty second tease to eating up about five minutes of the episode. They're far more interesting than the pack of imbeciles going to a study session or eating weird-looking food at a festival. Cause that's all they did this week. A great big pause button on them. And then a pause to the pause. Just their way of working up to what appears to be a training session next week, I suppose.

At any rate, the only connection the protagonists had to the things that were happening with the tertiary crowd is that they bumped into the miniboss a couple times. The miniboss that then caught a bullet to the face after, and you'll be shocked by this, spending most of her fight explaining how strong her shields are and/or having other characters explain how strong her shields are. The rest of the 'dialogue' there was them announcing her backstory. Again, for a one-off character that had maybe three minutes of screen time in total.

Drink every time Snow White screams something that a three year old might say.

Impressions:

It's amazing that they're finding ways to screw up the simplest things, but here we are, with a Snow White story where they start at the epilogue, change every character but the Evil Queen into a petulant brat going through a constant temper tantrum, and the Evil Queen just up and stops being evil over dinner. She's the goddamned Evil Queen. That's essentially her name. The really galling part of this episode is how the protagonists didn't do jack squat. X was kidnapped by the dwarves. Forced to kiss Snow White by the dwarves. Dragged to the castle by Snow White. And then just sat and listened to the series of flashbacks and exposition about how it was just a little spat and everything is resolved by Snow White shrilly yelling that nothing has anything to do with anything else. Then everybody goes "Oh, so it was the mirror. Damn that mirror," and then they leave, everything I guess resolved.

Couldn't we at least have gone in that corny Huntsman movie direction? Or any direction at all really? Weren't we supposed to fight something? Weren't we supposed to fix the story so it was like the actual Snow White story? I guess after they 'fixed' Treasure Island so that John Silver was the hero pirate in search of adventure, all bets are now off. Either that, or they're just not going to bother with much more than a few cursory overtures. Has mirror. Mentions poison apple. Throw in some screaming midgets that we'll call dwarves. SNOW WHITE! Cut, print, and ship.

We start here to get into the era where I became a bit more organized with things and especially with archiving, so let's call this era 2. Era 3 will be when I got fed up with terrible formats/inefficient image editing and started writing scripts to do all that crap for me, around Seinarukana/LWR, both of which were behemoths, but I digress.

Eternal Lovers is unfortunately a very different beast than Galaxy Angel/Moonlit Lovers. I don't believe that the pak format all the files are in changed all that much, but the internals are hugely different. First and foremost, the extraction is no longer really human readable.

Perhaps someone somewhere might be able to translate the pseudo-machine code, but not I. The speaker names are also a workaround that weren't part of the scripts to begin with. There's a speaker text file that associates IDs to speakers. To make things worse, there's some extra weird script flow stuff. I think that the jump text file in there provided a mapping between addresses, but it was far from pleasant. The worst of which is that every choice, literally every single choice in the entire game, is tucked away in a completely different script file. It's… a mess, but looking back, I suppose it served as just an amuse bouche or warmup to Kamidori's headache, but we'll get to that in a few weeks.

One thing that's not all that different is the iidx files, which like GA/ML have just a big dump. Unfortunately, that once again includes the battle quote file, where everything's just thrown together into one ginormous string dump. Like the main scripts, its format has been changed slightly too though. In GA, each output string is exactly what you see in the file. ie

In Eternal Lovers's (and, belated edit, Moonlit Lovers too) battle quote file, they 'streamlined' that by instead concating strings together. In other words, somewhere in the file is a string that's just "Milfeulle" and elsewhere, there's:

Again, I'll have to say that I simply don't understand what the hell the writers were going for here. She dreams of Riceland, a world of rice, and uses that to dissociate while doing horrible things that she is very obviously lying about being okay with. Then she's killed at pretty much random, but we need to keep her rice dream alive and stride off together into Rice-Elysium. The end. Also, there was still a demon antlion. And Annie May and Cletus back on the homeranch are saying that a storm's a'coming for the fifth week in a row. Do I really have that right? It's almost nihilistic in a way. There's only monsters, rapists, and packs of murderous child-killers roaming the countryside, so just think of the bunnies, George. Except that clearly someone on staff does think that they've delivered a touching tale of tragedy.

It really speaks to how bleak this show is. Not even effectively bleak since it's just suffering on suffering on more suffering. Nobody gets even the slightest happy end. Nobody is taking joy in life, living or anything. That was a really critically important part of the non-terrible Garous that Mappa's done; not only having a hedonistic character or two to contrast against a world of nothing but misery and death, but having a few not entirely happy endings, but ones where life goes on. It's really bad because it seems like Hyakkimaru recovering all the various pieces of himself is an obvious gateway metaphor in him learning to be human and/or the, to wax poetic, joy of life. Christ, her singing's right goddamned there. But they only seem interested in using it as a knife to twist in how Jesus-like she was.

I did glance at War Smile thing. It was another princess episode. After watching a battle, summoning up the courage to not turn away from blips on a screen, she wanted to surrender and turn herself over, but everyone banded together and wouldn't let her since she is just that super special and precious to them. Gag me. Yeah, we're done with that crap.

Impressions:

This could've been a pretty solid episode 2 if not for the rampant stills. But it's episode 5. And two of the midbosses it spent multiple episodes building up and delivering overlong exposition about their powers unceremoniously died to the protagonist just going "I used a little more of my power," followed by a cutaway explaination that using more of her power makes her stronger, in case you were confused. The third had a particularly bizarre scene where characters gasped in shock that the girl who they all saw using magic scissors revealed that she was a magic girl. She then proceeded to use no magic whatsoever except for the deus ex barriers that appear around things. And speaking of those, I also enjoyed how they revealed that the summoned monsters have them too. They did so by showing that everyone was armed with things that go right through them, immediately followed by magic girl shields which do work, and then the double double magic girl shields which are even shieldier. All put together, there's like two straight minutes on nothing but progressively stronger shields being dropped down and explained about how they're that much stronger.

The second half was far more miserable. Our old favorite, forced amnesia makes a return, wiping out the… I hate to say character development, but whatever you want to call it. They can regrow limbs at will and wipe away whatever traumatic event they feel like, so I guess nothing matters, until the writers either forget about it, or invent some new excuse for why they can't do it. Frankly, the best thing for the show at this point would be to kill of War Nurse. She's served her purpose to be Asuka's guilt trip and at this point is just introducing compounding deus ex crap. Killing her off would double down on the guilt and ditch much of the "nothing matters, we can reset everything" that whole segment introduced. Either that, or take the Frozen route and get way more corny, but I feel like this thinks it's way more serious than it actually is and will continue in the mopey dramatic vein.

I think I've made my peace with finishing this out. About 80% of that is that it reminds me of other, better stories of long ago that have lain dormant in my brain for a very long time, and it's kind of nice to stir those memories up and think about things that have actual themes or narratives. The other 20% was how absolutely comically shameless this episode was. First, the gacha swimsuit versions of the random characters. One of them even used a goddamned dolphin as a bow. Also, they're all transforming into magical girls now.

Second, because this has even less to do with Treasure Island/Long John Silver than Fate Whatever has to do with any of its feminized anythings. John Silver is a noble pirate in search of adventure, as all pirates are, but he's tempted by treasure, so they beat him up and restore his true pirate spirit and back to adventure he goes. Half the episode was closer to The Goonies than to Treasure Island. Did you guys even read the book at all? Did you even look at the back cover? Couldn't even spare the time to peruse the Wikipedia article? No. Okay, well, here's Jim Hawkins I guess playing the part of Ben Gunn because the whole mutiny thing that's the central plot of the book won't be making any appearance whatsoever. Also, John Silver is the hero now. Sorry, Jim. Better luck next time.

This edition will, I suspect, be especially useless for anything but as a historical curiosity since these tools were… Not Good™, and far better ones have been developed since I worked on this. Like with GA, I eschewed the image stuff, although to be totally frank, I'm also not entirely sure where it's gotten off to. Oh well.

There's only really two kinds of files here. The main scripts are in the xmls, and the eagle-eyed among you will quickly see that there's a ton that's not translated. I mentioned this on the now defunct forum's translation notes, but there are both a ton of dummied out files/strings, as well as a lot of scripts that simply are never called. The way I worked through the scripts is by playing through the game, jotting down a distinguishing string from a scene with a note as to what scene it was, and collecting a bunch of those before going through them. Scripts are grouped, broadly speaking (ie All of Marine's scripts are clustered together), so once you have an entry point, you can generally do a character's entire set of events. The inserter will also handle linebreaks automatically… mostly. If font size gets changed (can't be seen in the scripts), that'll screw it up, but linebreaks can be added manually too. There was also a tool specifically for working on these scripts which may or may not be in that package. At this point, I feel comfortable admitting that I hated it and almost never used it.

The big pitfall in the scripts is that the speaker tags are not to be trusted. The first instance of a new speaker is usually accurate, but after that, there's some kind of internal control that's not reflected in the xml files. It doesn't usually come up, but there are large scenes where it becomes especially problematic because everything is mislabeled. The big place it totally falls apart are the inter-combat quotes triggered by specific pairs of characters. The speakers for those are always wrong, and to make matters worse, each character's entire set of lines is in a single file. In other words, every in-battle exchange Rouga can trigger is all in one file, with nothing marking where one exchange ends and the next one starts, let alone who's talking. Thankfully, there was a Japanese fansite that listed a ton of them, and I could use that to fill in the vast majority, and left ones that I had no idea the context in hopes that people would report them, which worked pretty well, but I know of at least a few obscure ones that ended up missed in the final patch.

The other nutso thing is that virtually every random string, all the location names, event names, random in-scene choices, etc, is all in Strings.xml, along with about a billion debug and internal things. The extra wacky thing there is that event strings are all stretched to fill the text box for god only knows what reason. I guess it maybe looks less awful in the Japanese. In English though, it looks horrendous. The workaround for that is that every one of those is padded out with extra spaces. See "Inspect: Hell Hole" above in that image there? It's actually "Inspect: Hell Hole ".

The only other semi-interesting thing is the names file. It's what's used for all the character names, as well as to generate all the random names. It consists of a buttload of surnames and given names that it then randomly slaps together for all the generics. The Arabian, Western, and monsters also have their own set of strings, but are also part of that same names.txt. You'll also notice the blank space between each lines, which is where the furigana went. Some of the Japanese names did end up needing to be shortened due to string size limits, especially when pairing two names together. If you wanted to add yourself as a generic to the game, there's where you'd do it, and most of the staff who worked on the project are immortalized as possible monster names.